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I still have no valid reason to use grub2 other than my illustrious benevolent dictator for life has decided that our next release will use it. For myself plain old grub works just fine, and it makes my secure system handle just fine, as on that system the entire FS is encrypted and I keep /boot on a thumbdrive. I also keep a copy of it inside the install, so I can get into it and make a new boot key if I have to.

The dealbreaker for me is losing an independent /boot partition. I've use this for years with my multiboot systems, because it is a brilliant bit of design that make it dead easy to manage them. You can blow every last operating system away and still have a usable /boot partition. There won't be anything to boot to, but you can install new OSes and easily edit legacy GRUB to boot them. Tying the bootloader to a specific Linux installation is a huge step backwards, as is taking away simple configuration editing, and requiring a script to update it. Shades of last-millennum LILO. I'd rather use LILO, at least it's comprehensible.

> What would make GRUB2 work for me are clear tutorials on how to make it do what I want/need it to do.

That's always the problem with FOSS, isn't it? The changes in xorg, in particular, come to mind. Genius move to eliminate xorg.conf and then not tell anybody how to fix problems that arise. If only there were a suitable alternative to Linux, but none come to mind.

Booting from LVM2 is great, but GRUB2 seems more steps back than forward from the user perspective. Much more complex configuration, not distro-indepenent and need to run some command every time you change the config files.
I think Akkana nails it in the first part:

Quoting:Reading the grub2 project's website, it's hard not to conclude that grub2 exists mainly because everybody was tired of hacking on the old grub1 code, and decided it would be more fun to write a new toy from scratch.

I hope someone is going to 'backport' the LVM feature to Grub1, because after KDE4 I'm a bit hesitant to switch to the 'next developer toy' which doesn't care about migration / configuration issues of their current userbase. At least they keep GRUB1 alive and most distro's aren't forcing GRUB2, that's a good thing. Maybe someone did learn something?

Maybe it presents an opportunity to try extlinux*? After all, last time someone installed LILO for me while the docs also mentioned GRUB (Gentoo docs give you the choice) and I asked my companion why not GRUB, he told me "it's an entire OS on its own". Reading about GRUB2 I think he's right, and do I need all this?

Looking at the differences between Grub Legacy and Grub 2 it seems that a rewrite was a good idea. Think support for non-x86 machines, i18n and l10n and modular architecture. That last bit is quite important. Grub legacy had a very annoying issue that because it was non-modular, that it could get too big. I used to have a dual Xeon HP Proliant with hardware RAID, ILO and various other things. Making that thing boot with Grub Legacy was... a challenge. With all the stuff it needed it was hard to get it small enough to make the machine actually boot it without choking. Grub 2 is easier. Because it's modular you can drop much more stuff that you don't need.

Let's see, there's EFI, and the smarter-but-dumber OpenBoot PROM. I don't know about the former, but...

If you're willing to put your boot files (kernel + initrd) on UFS, OBP will be happy to load them for you, no on-disk boot loader needed. I know it was true for Sparc and PA-RISC, and IIRC it held for IBM Power as well. Read access for UFS is fairly easy to implement, and fits well in on-board ROM; not so JFS, Veritas, or ZFS.

(Yes, I know, memories have gotten smaller and cheaper, and in my case, shorter...)

In my Debian Lenny to Squeeze upgrade, I got GRUB 2, and it started out chainloading from GRUB 1 into GRUB 2 just to make sure it worked.

It did work, and once I confirmed that I ran:

# upgrade-from-grub-legacy

That pulled out GRUB 1, and now GRUB 2 is the default bootloader. I had already added my extra kernel parameter (nomodeset) as part of the dist-upgrade, so now I'm running GRUB 2 and couldn't be happier.

Of course I'm not dual-booting ....

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